Before everyone complains about the George Zimmerman trial, let us just remember this. In the American justice system a man must be convicted by a jury of his peers, NOT the media. Not only does one have to be convicted, but one has to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

While I do not know whether Zimmerman acted in self-defense or went out to kill Trayvon Martin, none of us armchair jurors does either. Only Zimmerman knows.

Do you think that Obama may have spoken out about this to distract people away from Snowden?. There have been rumours on the net that Snowden has stuff that could bring down the US Government. It is unusual that the US should bring down and search the President of Venezuelas plane for Snowden, risking public outcry especially in south America, an international incident by all accounts, they must want him bad.........because all this stuff that he has said has been known of at least a year in the public domain.

Yes, Obama is doing lots of things to distract us from a poor economy, distract us from a US diplomat being attacked by al qaeda on the anniversary of 9/11 (Duh!) at the American Consulate in Benghazi, the ugly side of The Affordable Care Act (sic), the fact that he didn't close Guantanamo Bay down as promised, the fact that billions of investment in solar companies has resulted in solar company bankruptcies, the fact that he's using The Patriot Act just as his predecessor did (now that *he* is the president), etc. All this is done to win the next election.

Yes, we will have our intelligence-gathering activities exposed to our enemies. Yes, US lives here and abroad (innocent or involved in intelligence-gathering) will be lost. Yes, Obama will be made to look like a hypocrite.

No, our government isn't going to collapse. And (Danger, danger, personal opinion!) we can't get Obama out of government that easy. Bummer!

Yeah thing is I notice so many coincidences between the US ,the EU and the UK....maybe they all go to the same script writer.As an example Gay marriage..big thing with Obama,Cameron and the EU ....Why? there are major things to worry about.....it's like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic ............and notice as well "Service Sector" Jobs are on the increase ...How does that work?? less people working producing stuff more people on the dole ..so let's eat out, or maybe it's the rich bankers eating everything

But as to Zimmerman , what has the verdict of a lawful court got to do with a little prik like Morgan?

and notice as well "Service Sector" Jobs are on the increase ...How does that work?? less people working producing stuff more people on the dole ..so let's eat out, or maybe it's the rich bankers eating everything

Neither, this is a contuation of a decades-old trend. The services sector includes everything that is not ag, mining, construction, manufacturing, and related activities. These latter activities account for around 20% of the GDP and jobs of countries like the US and UK and this percentage has been steadily going down since the 1950s (although output productivity has still been increasing). Meanwhile the services sector (which includes finance, insurance, trade, business services, education, IT, and most other types of jobs in addition to food service) account for that 80% bulk. Check out Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph which discusses a study of job sector change for the US from 1947-2007.

The Atlantic wrote:

Manufacturing and agriculture employed one in three workers just after World War II. Today, those sectors employ only one in eight.

Where did all the making-stuff and growing-stuff jobs go? They went into services.

The champion in the last six decades was finance, insurance and real estate, which doubled its share of employment from 10.5% to 21.4%. But the broader service industry -- including professional and business services (a broad catch-all with marketing, managing, consulting, computer services) and health and education services -- also grew from about 13% to about 30%. Everything else has stayed pretty much the same. Government, wholesale/retail, information, and construction account for a little more than a third of the economy today, and they accounted for a little more than a third of the economy 60 years ago.

Many of these faster growing employment areas took the hardest hit during the recession so a lot of the service-sector growth being seen now is the post-recession rebound currently underway.

The Atlantic wrote:

The big story about American jobs in the post-war period is this: The manufacturing/agriculture economy shrunk from 33% to 12%, and the services economy grew from 24% to 50%. I don't want to leave you with a facile explanation, but for the purposes of space, I think it's acceptable to say that as manufacturing and agriculture got more efficient, they required fewer American workers, while the services industry (which had slower efficiency gains since it has more person-to-person work) required more employees to keep up with the rising demand for consulting, nurses, teachers, computer technicians, and so on. This isn't a sad story, or a happy story. It's just what's happening, and it's not accurate to think we can change it very much by, say, creating a panel to badger China's trade practices, as the president has proposed.

Closing thought: Why isn't anybody talking about the tragic decline of agriculture? The industry's share of workers has fallen by 80 percent in the last 60 years. Nobody seems to think that's much of a tragedy, but we do consider it tragic that manufacturing has lost 60 percent of its share over the same period. Are we being hyperbolic about the decline of manufacturing, in particular, or are we being way too stoic about the greater loss in agriculture employment?

You Are Not Trayvon MartinHis death wasn’t about race, guns, or your pet issue. It was about misjudgment and overreaction—exactly what we’re doing now to the verdict.By William Saletan|Posted Monday, July 15, 2013, at 5:15 PM

Trayvon Martin is dead, George Zimmerman has been acquitted, and millions of people are outraged. Some politicians are demanding a second prosecution of Zimmerman, this time for hate crimes. Others are blaming the tragedy on “Stand Your Ground” laws, which they insist must be repealed. Many who saw the case as proof of racism in the criminal justice system see the verdict as further confirmation. Everywhere you look, people feel vindicated in their bitter assumptions. They want action.

But that’s how Martin ended up dead. It’s how Zimmerman ended up with a bulletproof vest he might have to wear for the rest of his life. It’s how activists and the media embarrassed themselves with bogus reports. The problem at the core of this case wasn’t race or guns. The problem was assumption, misperception, and overreaction. And that cycle hasn’t ended with the verdict. It has escalated.

I almost joined the frenzy. Yesterday I was going to write that Zimmerman pursued Martin against police instructions and illustrated the perils of racial profiling. But I hadn’t followed the case in detail. So I sat down and watched the closing arguments: nearly seven hours of video in which the prosecution and defense went point by point through the evidence as it had been hashed out at the trial. Based on what I learned from the videos, I did some further reading.

It turned out I had been wrong about many things. The initial portrait of Zimmerman as a racist wasn’t just exaggerated. It was completely unsubstantiated. It’s a case study in how the same kind of bias that causes racism can cause unwarranted allegations of racism. Some of the people Zimmerman had reported as suspicious were black men, so he was a racist. Members of his family seemed racist, so he was a racist. Everybody knew he was a racist, so his recorded words were misheard as racial slurs, proving again that he was a racist.

The 911 dispatcher who spoke to Zimmerman on the fatal night didn’t tell him to stay in his car. Zimmerman said he was following a suspicious person, and the dispatcher told him, "We don't need you to do that." Chief prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda conceded in his closing argument that these words were ambiguous. De la Rionda also acknowledged, based on witness and forensic evidence, that both men “were scraping and rolling and fighting out there.” He pointed out that the wounds, blood evidence, and DNA didn’t match Zimmerman’s story of being thoroughly restrained and pummeled throughout the fight. But the evidence didn’t fit the portrait of Martin as a sweet-tempered child, either. And the notion that Zimmerman hunted down Martin to accost him made no sense. Zimmerman knew the police were on the way. They arrived only a minute or so after the gunshot. The fight happened in a public area surrounded by townhouses at close range. It was hardly the place or time to start shooting.

That doesn’t make Zimmerman a hero. It just makes him a reckless fool instead of a murderer. In a post-verdict press conference, his lawyer, Mark O’Mara, claimed that “the evidence supported that George Zimmerman did nothing wrong,” that “the jury decided that he acted properly in self-defense,” and that Zimmerman “was never guilty of anything except protecting himself in self-defense. I’m glad that the jury saw it that way.” That’s complete BS. The only thing the jury decided was that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Zimmerman had committed second-degree murder or manslaughter.

Zimmerman is guilty, morally if not legally, of precipitating the confrontation that led to Martin’s death. He did many things wrong. Mistake No. 1 was inferring that Martin was a burglar. In his 911 call, Zimmerman cited Martin’s behavior. “It’s raining, and he’s just walking around” looking at houses, Zimmerman said. He warned the dispatcher, “He’s got his hand in his waistband.” He described Martin’s race and clothing only after the dispatcher asked about them. Whatever its basis, the inference was false.

Mistake No. 2 was pursuing Martin on foot. Zimmerman had already done what the neighborhood watch rules advised: He had called the police. They would have arrived, questioned Martin, and ascertained that he was innocent. Instead, Zimmerman, packing a concealed firearm, got out and started walking after Martin. Zimmerman’s initial story, that he was trying to check the name of the street, was so laughable that his attorneys abandoned it. He was afraid Martin would get away. So he followed Martin, hoping to update the cops.

Mistake No. 3 was Zimmerman’s utter failure to imagine how his behavior looked to Martin. You’re a black kid walking home from a convenience store with Skittles and a fruit drink. Some dude in a car is watching and trailing you. God knows what he wants. You run away. He gets out of the car and follows you. What are you supposed to do? In Zimmerman’s initial interrogation, the police expressed surprise that he hadn’t identified himself to Martin as a neighborhood watch volunteer. They suggested that Martin might have been alarmed when Zimmerman reached for an object that Zimmerman, but not Martin, knew was a phone. Zimmerman seemed baffled. He was so convinced of Martin’s criminal intent that he hadn’t considered how Martin, if he were innocent, would perceive his stalker.

Martin, meanwhile, was profiling Zimmerman. On his phone, he told a friend he was being followed by a “creepy-ass cracker.” The friend—who later testified that this phrase meant pervert—advised Martin, “You better run.” She reported, as Zimmerman did, that Martin challenged Zimmerman, demanding to know why he was being hassled. If Zimmerman’s phobic misreading of Martin was the first wrong turn that led to their fatal struggle, Martin’s phobic misreading of Zimmerman may have been the second.

In court, evidence and scrutiny have exposed these difficult, complicated truths. But outside the court, ideologues are ignoring them. They’re oversimplifying a tragedy that was caused by oversimplification. Martin has become Emmett Till. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is using the verdict to attack Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which wasn’t invoked in this case. The grievance industrial complex is pushing the Department of Justice to prosecute Zimmerman for bias-motivated killing, based on evidence that didn’t even support a conviction for unpremeditated killing. Zimmerman’s lawyers have teamed up with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, inadvertently, to promote the false message that Zimmerman’s acquittal means our society thinks everything he did was OK.

It wasn’t OK. It was stupid and dangerous. It led to the unnecessary death of an innocent young man. It happened because two people—their minds clouded by stereotypes that went well beyond race—assumed the worst about one another and acted in haste. If you want to prevent the next Trayvon Martin tragedy, learn from their mistakes. Don’t paint the world in black and white. Don’t declare the whole justice system racist, or blame every gun death on guns, or confuse acquittal with vindication. And the next time you see somebody who looks like a punk or a pervert, hold your fire.

This excerpt from the above article is what I was trying to get at with my previous posts

Quote:

Mistake No. 3 was Zimmerman’s utter failure to imagine how his behavior looked to Martin. You’re a black kid walking home from a convenience store with Skittles and a fruit drink. Some dude in a car is watching and trailing you. God knows what he wants. You run away. He gets out of the car and follows you. What are you supposed to do? In Zimmerman’s initial interrogation, the police expressed surprise that he hadn’t identified himself to Martin as a neighborhood watch volunteer. They suggested that Martin might have been alarmed when Zimmerman reached for an object that Zimmerman, but not Martin, knew was a phone. Zimmerman seemed baffled. He was so convinced of Martin’s criminal intent that he hadn’t considered how Martin, if he were innocent, would perceive his stalker.

Martin, meanwhile, was profiling Zimmerman. On his phone, he told a friend he was being followed by a “creepy-ass cracker.” The friend—who later testified that this phrase meant pervert—advised Martin, “You better run.” She reported, as Zimmerman did, that Martin challenged Zimmerman, demanding to know why he was being hassled. If Zimmerman’s phobic misreading of Martin was the first wrong turn that led to their fatal struggle, Martin’s phobic misreading of Zimmerman may have been the second.

Minor point but I think the friend testified incorrectly about the meaning of "cracker" in the context that Martin used it, where I grew up in the urban south that was slang for a white person.

Minor point but I think the friend testified incorrectly about the meaning of "cracker" in the context that Martin used it, where I grew up in the urban south that was slang for a white person.

Umm...

Sorry, but I have to speak up here. I grew up in a neighborhood that went from virtually all white to all black in a matter of 10 years. We stayed because we had no reason to leave. And I learned a lot.

I had a few close friends in the black community - close enough that we could have fun with each other. My friend Jerome and I were close enough that we could use language with each other such as Blacks use with each other in rap music. With a broad smile he'd call me a sorry-assed cracker, and I'd call him niggah. It worked.

But we knew full well what cracker meant. He wouldn't be caught dead saying this to other whites, and I using the N word outside our private communication.

I found the explanation of the meaning of cracker in this trial to be comical... to the point of damning. In my opinion it unwittingly undermined Martin's characterization as a victim. Sorry, but racism goes both ways. This is the elephant in the room that *some* Trayvon Martin advocates refuse to acknowledge. And it's worse than that. I would offer that many are blind to their deep prejudices. Me? As my wife is want to say, I have no shame. As a scientist it's my job to speak the truth - even if it isn't politically correct.

I laugh when someone pulls the race card on me when I criticize Obama. I remind them that his ancestors were never owned by whites. That usually shuts them up pretty quickly.

The word "Cracker" was used in a cell phone conversation between two friends. Zimmerman wouldn't have known Martin used it. I know people who use the N word freely when the thought police aren't in town

But the broader public does not matter. What matters is the jury. And it is hard to imagine how it can help the prosecution for those six southern women to know Martin spent some of his final moments uttering a racial insult, no matter what he intended.

Like I said, slang for a white person. Bill you definitely have a way of telling stories about your past more colorfully than I do about mine, and I mean that in a complementary way.

Was she testifying for the prosecution or the defense? I have not seen the context in which that testimony was made. I would assume she was a witness for the prosecution, but if so it does seem odd that they would have brought it up (although maybe it was already in statements and the defense brought it up on cross examination).

The word "Cracker" was used in a cell phone conversation between two friends. Zimmerman wouldn't have known Martin used it. I know people who use the N word freely when the thought police aren't in town

It doesn't matter, Ray. Use of the word implies racist thought. And the race card was (innapropriately) used by others to suggest this is why Zimmerman shot Martin. As it turns out, the shoe fit the other foot much better. Martin very well may have attacked Zimmeman because he was white.

Quote:

"Cracker" has also been used as a proud or jocular self-description. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, "cracker" is used informally by some white residents of Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations. However, the term "white cracker" is seldom used self-referentially and remains an offensive racial slur used to demean Caucasians.

Believe it or not, I am constantly on my boys about their derogatory language in reference to people of various nationalities. Funny... my dad's generation harbored prejudices. I thought those disappeared with myself, my brother, and my sisters. Turns out racism rears its ugly head again in various places.

I have made it very clear with my boys that they may not use the N word or the F word in my presence. I tell them that it offends me, and that use of the word in my presence at work could get me fired. As an endearing term to a close friend in private (where there's give and take), yes. It's equivalent to me telling a girlfriend that I'm her bitch. In general? Absolutely not.

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